August 31, 2015

Prospective students are touting massive open online course enrollment and completion on college applications, often in hopes of differentiating themselves from their competitors. The New York Times reports that college admissions officers are viewing these classes on applications as similar to extracurriculars that they don’t necessarily need to verify, because they are interesting but not a game changer for a student’s application. Some admissions officers say there’s little confidence in each MOOC’s content or quality based on a course title, leaving their impact on an applicant’s chances minimal for now.

The day when students are no longer required to pay hundreds of dollars each semester for textbooks and course materials may finally be on the horizon. During his recent fall address to faculty, USF Provost Ralph Wilcox announced that the students enrolled in professor Jennifer Schneider’s Literature in Childhood Education course will use an open-access e-textbook to read digital literature collections, move through interactive lessons and visit children’s literature museums. “If we can find a way to reduce the cost of textbooks for students and engage them more fully in the learning process, students of this generation, I think, are going to be all the more successful,” Wilcox said in an interview. Schneider, an associate professor in the College of Education, said her online class’s e-textbook originally began as a proposal to the Textbook Affordability Project (TAP).

Research shows that learning something new is one of the best ways to keep your mind healthy. No wonder people over 50 seem to naturally gravitate to the vast world of online learning for everything from pursuing a passion to retooling for a new career. One in 10 students who take online courses at Kaplan University, for instance, is over 50, says Sophie Vlessing, senior vice president at Kaplan Higher and Professional Education. Kevin Hawkins, 56, of Washington, D.C., recently graduated from Kaplan University with a bachelor’s degree in health and wellness after a 36-year career in broadcasting. Now Hawkins runs his own online health and wellness coaching business. “I knew I needed more education to shift careers, and I liked the flexibility of taking online courses,” Hawkins says.

August 30, 2015

In CBS’s “What’s an Online MBA Worth?” Peter Shea, former head of the online education system for the State University of New York, said, “There is a growing body of evidence that suggest that the quality of online learning outcomes…is actually better than that of face-to-face instruction.” Be sure to vet your online MBA choices. You want to make sure that the on-line MBA faculty has a crossover with the residential faculty – if they outsource their faculty it is a sign the program is not as reputable and they don’t place the same value on their online education options. Some people like the branding that comes with a top business school and are willing to risk the debt in order to “wear” the school label and benefit from the networking opportunities. But there is more than one way to reach your goal, and an online MBA from a top accredited school with great faculty at a lower cost is an attractive option.

While the proliferation of massive open online courses (MOOCs) has expanded learning opportunities for individuals around the world, the digital classroom is also subject to many of the same issues as the traditional one — such as cheating. In a new working paper, researchers at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have identified a new method of cheating specific to open online courses, and have recommended a number of strategies that are proving effective in preventing it. The working paper, “Detecting and Preventing ‘Multiple-Account’ Cheating in Massive Open Online Courses,” was published today on arXiv.org, an online repository for electronic preprints.

Back in 2012, we welcomed the dawn of the massive open online course (MOOC) and its promise to democratize learning with open arms. Stories like that of Christos Porios, a 16-year-old living in Alexandroupoli, Greece, who discovered a Stanford computer science class on online platform Coursera and soon mastered machine learning, captured our collective imagination. The learning experience was new, but the brand-name institutions providing the content were familiar, with universities like Harvard, MIT, and Stanford leading the way. Fast-forward to 2015, and the dynamics shaping online learning have changed dramatically. The typical student is not a teenage genius, but a mid-career working professional. And the brand names lending credibility are no longer vaunted educational institutions, but rather private companies on the lookout for new talent.

August 29, 2015

Human-to human communications have been the bedrock of our lives. More recently, machine-to-machine streaming has become a dominant and often disruptive dance partner in the communication landscape. And now we are glimpsing a world where human-to-machine links culminate in one seamlessly orchestrated waltz. Imagine smart sensors embedded in the school parking garage, alerting you to a much coveted, and now suddenly available, spot right by your office. Real-time, actionable data will help schools know exactly when to service equipment and achieve savings from the most optimal use of facilities and energy. Smart doors and security cameras will know when to open, shut, lock and monitor movement through a space. The mobile devices flooding campuses today are the first wave of an era of interconnected devices, aptly named the Internet of Things, or IoT. By tapping into the data transmitted by inanimate objects around us, schools can achieve greater revenue and value by moving away from transactional interactions with students, staff, providers and assets.

“The best approaches to technology-enabled learning recognise that learning, like all development, involves complex, social beings engaged in complex intellectual, social and psychological processes that happen in a fluid space,” says Dr Najma Agherdien, Instructional Designer at The Independent Institute of Education. “It is also true that what and how people learn influences what they are able to do with what they learn,” she says. Agherdien says online learning at higher education institutions should be deliberately structured to promote the skills needed in the world of work. “Key to success in the workplace is the ability to consider problems and scenarios and select the appropriate knowledge needed to resolve the issue. It is also vital that graduates in the workplace know how to, and are able to, access knowledge they do not already possess. This means they need to know how to find sources and then to evaluate the relevance of those sources for the situation that needs resolving,” she says.

August 28, 2015

When the time came to refresh the computer hardware in Drake University’s labs, the Infrastructure and Security Services (ISS) team turned to virtualization to reduce their hardware needs while providing students with anytime, anywhere access to applications on their own devices. Many of the students at Drake bring Mac laptops to campus, whereas much of university’s software is Windows-based. The university wanted to implement a virtualization system that would let students access applications regardless of the type of device they were using. “We were looking essentially for a seamless environment that would work for both Windows or Mac users, or really on any platform — iPads, mobile phones,” said Chris Mielke, team lead of ISS Infrastructure Services.

College students are surrounded by technology inside and outside of the classroom. And increasingly educators are reaching learners through smart phones and laptops. Community Voices producer Jeff Hiles is an instructional designer at Wright State University. He finds that for some students with disabilities, the move to online learning brings new opportunities and new challenges.

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York released its latest Report on Household Debt and Credit Developments, and the news isn’t good for student-borrowers. As of the second calendar quarter ending June 30, seriously delinquent student loans (which the FRBNY describes as those whose payments are 90 or more days past due), increased to 11.5% of the $1.19 trillion dollars’ worth of education loans, versus 11.1% in the first quarter. Before you dismiss four-tenths of one percent as decimal dust, consider this: Although student loans make up only 10% of all consumer debt, the amount of seriously past due student loan payments total nearly one-third of all seriously past-due debt payments. What’s more, of the total $1.19 trillion in outstanding education-related loans, only about half that amount is actually in repayment at this time (the balance is deferred because the borrowers are still in school). So instead of 11.5% being seriously delinquent, it’s actually twice that amount: 23%.

August 27, 2015

A decade has passed since America’s newest research university opened amid farmland in central California. And surprisingly little on the landscape has changed. Cows still graze alongside the University of California, Merced. There’s no student union, and some researchers are based miles away at a former Air Force base. Merced’s experience should be a warning, said Henry Eyring, co-author of “The Innovative University: Changing the DNA of Higher Education from the Inside Out” and academic vice president at Brigham Young University’s Idaho campus. As much as politicians like to cut ribbons in front of new campuses, he said, traditional colleges have become much more expensive than online courses and other new means of delivering education.

If the notion for the past decade in digital humanities investment has been to let a thousand flowers bloom, it seems to have worked. Digital creation is no longer just the realm of specialists, IT developers, and librarians who manage collections. Today, with digital humanities (DH) hitting its stride, historians, philosophers, and poets not only are learning how to use tools to conduct analysis for their work; they also are building collections, developing their own tools, and constructing platforms. Major funding may still come from just a few usual suspects, but academic and cultural institutions are carving out and reallocating funds to create and support the digital initiatives. This democratization of digital creation signals an exciting time, and yet it can pose institution-wide challenges as well.

In other industries, unbundling has driven fundamental change. Over the past decade, sales of recorded music are down 50 percent and continue to fall each year. Digital technology has forced a revolution in a business model that, in the past, relied on bundling the music that consumers wanted (singles) with the music that they didn’t want (the rest of the album). Now, in a music industry unbundled by technology, consumers purchase only the products they want. In the television industry, viewers now watch individual shows, thanks to DVRs and Netflix, rather than channels or networks. Once viewers are given a mechanism for paying only for the shows they watch rather than the thousands they don’t, cable and satellite TV bills will collapse. Where does this leave the higher education bundle? At present, degrees remain the currency of the labor market. But as currency, they’re about as portable as the giant stone coins used on the island of Yap. What if technology could produce a finer currency that would be accepted by consumers and employers alike?

August 26, 2015

More than 12,500 people from 163 countries have enrolled in ASU’s first for-credit massive open online course, or MOOC, which launched Thursday. Arizona State University has launched the first class of its Global Freshman Academy, which gives anyone in the world the opportunity to earn freshman-level university credit online without having to go through the college admissions process. The countries with the most students are the U.S., India and the United Kingdom.

Two research questions were used to guide the authors during their research: 1) What are the common perceptions among college students about the nature of MOOCs; and 2) How do current college students’ perceptions and attitudes toward MOOCs compare with press discussions on MOOCs? Thematic analysis on the qualitative data (the authors asked students to respond to eight open-ended questions about MOOCs) revealed six primary themes concerning MOOC perceptions: Reliability, accessibility, content, learning, communication, and outcomes. The authors state that as the themes identified mirror previously published MOOC commentaries, “pedagogical discussion of MOOCs should move beyond polarized evaluations and incorporate student perspectives in further empirical investigation of MOOCs as a learning environment.”

Coursera announced in July that they crossed 1 million registrations as China became their second largest market, overtaking India. Most U.S. consumer Internet companies have a hard time breaking into China. Cultural differences and the Internet firewall are a huge barrier to entry. Even tech giants like Google, Facebook and Twitter have pulled out or found themselves on the wrong side of the Chinese firewall. So how did Coursera, a relatively young company, achieve this significant milestone?

August 25, 2015

A Stanford University cryptography expert will be kicking off a new online graduate certificate program today by examining the future of bitcoin and cyber security during a free webinar open to the public. The Cyber Security graduate certificate program requires participants to pass four courses from among six topics, including “Computer and Network Security,” “Technology and National Security” and “Crypto Currencies: Bitcoin and Friends.” The latter course is being taught by Dan Boneh, a professor of computer science at the Stanford School of Engineering.

Yavapai College, is balancing course and document access online along with traditional classroom experience and support. Imagine an empty college classroom lit with the vapor glow of a lone computer. While this scenario is not likely anytime soon, the trend is undeniable: Online enrollment at Yavapai College has risen 100 percent over the past five years, with 30 percent of students never setting foot in a classroom.

Syracuse University professor Anthony Rotolo will take his students where no class has gone before. For the first time in it’s five-year history, Rotolo’s Star Trek class will be offered to the public for free. Fans across the U.S. can sign up for the online course, which will run from September until December. Overwhelming interest in the class has seen enrollment increase at warp speed. According to Rotolo, around 2000 people have already registered.